Loose Lemur

Bill James, the Boston Red Sox senior adviser and resident skeptic, made his name by using statistics to debunk many of baseball’s truisms—by showing that much of what we think we see on a ball field turns out to be little more than an illusion when held up to the light of evidence. Then, after the Red Sox won their first World Series in eighty-six years, breaking Babe Ruth’s supposed “curse,” James published an essay, “Underestimating the Fog,” in which he seemed to backpedal on some crucial points. He suggested, for instance, that clutch hitting—long since dismissed by Jamesian rationalists as a myth—might exist after all, and that his colleagues just weren’t looking hard enough. Diehards in the statistician community wondered if James hadn’t gone soft with age, and begun seeing ghosts.

Several weeks ago, James was walking home from Fenway Park, after a Red Sox victory over the Kansas City Royals, when he came across a strange-looking animal with a speckled gray head. He at first took it to be a cat, but soon noticed a number of peculiar characteristics: the animal had large eyes on the sides of its head, a puglike face, and an extra-long tail (“like a broom handle”), and it moved with “an odd sashaying motion.” The moon was full. James was alone on the street. He stared at the animal for, as he later recalled, “a length of time which is probably six or seven times as long as the period that a fly ball is in the air.” The animal scurried under a parked car, at one point seeming to lift its hind legs over a stick in the road by using its tail as a kind of lever.

James quickly dispensed with the obvious candidates—dog, squirrel, raccoon, rat, skunk, possum—and began working his way down a checklist of more exotic possibilities: sloth, bear, porcupine, beaver. By the time he reached his house, he had decided that the animal he saw must have been a lemur. Lemurs are primates native to Madagascar, and by all available evidence, he realized, this was unlikely; the odds of stumbling upon a lemur living on the streets of a northeastern metropolis are a little like the odds of a baseball team’s going eighty-six years without a championship because of a curse. James says he called the local animal-control center, which informed him that his was the first Boston lemur sighting on record. (The Franklin Park Zoo, in Dorchester, has four ring-tailed lemurs, but all are accounted for.)

One of James’s friends discovered a report, on the Web site CryptoZoology.com, of a “strange lemur-like dog” spotted on a farm in Sherborn, Massachusetts, in 2002. (“It reminded me of a small, skinnier version of a Tasmanian wolf,” the poster, a filmmaker named Andrew Mudge, wrote.) Sherborn is twenty miles southwest of Boston, and James hypothesized that the lemur could have migrated in the years since and come to be living in the trees of a sanctuary in the area. The city, according to his theory, is an ideal habitat, because there are few natural predators, and the human demographics skew young and indifferent to wildlife. (James, by contrast, lived for most of his life in Kansas, where he saw enough skunks, possums, and raccoons to rule them out immediately.)

James eventually wrote a three-thousand-word account of his sighting and posted it on his Web site, which requires a subscription. “There is a lemur living wild on the streets of Boston, and if I have to be the first person to say so, well . . . that’s just the way it is,” he wrote. “I believe that if you set up a nocturnal observation camera at that location, you probably would wind up with footage of this animal, probably within a few days.” Several readers posted comments suggesting that the animal might have been a fisher or a stoat. “Not wishing to be dogmatic, in my mind it was simply a lemur,” James responded.

“I decided to report the sighting, against the urgings of my wife, who thought that I would get a reputation as a nut,” James explained in a recent e-mail. “I assume, if people start making fun of me for seeing a lemur, other people will step forward and say, ‘I saw something, too.’ ” No such luck yet.

Andrew Mudge, when reached by phone recently, assumed the call to be a prank. “Let me get this straight: you’re calling me about the lemur I saw in 2002?” he asked. “Which one of my friends put you up to this?” Mudge then recalled that he’d received an e-mail from a man named Bill James, but hadn’t paid it much attention. “I just remember having this gut feeling that this animal does not belong in this part of the world,” he wrote in an e-mail, thinking back to his sighting. “Ironically, I was leaving the house to go to a Red Sox game when this happened.” ♦